The web is bursting at the seams with search marketing information and too much of it is completely untrue. Legal Professionals who try to do their own SEO are often unaware of which strategies should take precedence, which have some value, and which are a complete waste of effort.
Law firms that decide to retain web professionals have the advantage of not having to make their own strategy decisions, but more importantly, they don't have to spend the time implementing the often time-consuming SEO tasks.
As with any professional dynamic, the relationship between a law firm and its search engine specialist must be based on mutual trust. While the lawyer needs to be fully aware of the tactics, progress, and results being made by their search engine consultant, they also need to trust that the SEO knows what is needed for them to succeed and isn't doing anything that will hurt the firm's website and/or reputation.
"A change will do you (and your website) good". If you are unwilling to have optimizations made, then you simply can't have your site optimized. While link building, social media, paid-search, etc, are all key components to getting rankings online, if you want your law firm's site to perform for your targeted words, you have to be willing to make keyword and structural changes to the site itself. Change is good. Keep in mind that the goal here is not to just improve your search engine rankings, but help you increase your client base. Too many law firms (and their SEOs) lose sight of this point.
The net is a dynamic, constantly evolving, place. New sites are going up, old sites are coming down. New stuff is added to the internet every second. Combine that with the fact that search engine algorithms are in a constant state of change and you've got a roller coaster of rankings.
Several legal sites, especially older ones, are built by designers that don't know much about SEO. These sites "look pretty" but don't do so hot in search pages because of bad structure and missing components. In extreme cases, you might have to be willing to quit a site altogether. Other times the site may be salvageable with several structural and architectural modifications. Not making these changes can cripple your web marketing. Don't be afraid to make the big changes needed to take advantage the benefits SEO can have for your firm.
Unfortunately, many unscrupulous law firm SEO specialists sell magic claiming to be able to get your firm to the top of the search engine rankings in a very short time. As a result, many lawyers want immediate results and don't trust search consultants in general. They want to spend very little money and they have very high expectations.
Over the years, law firm prospects have sent us reports from just about all of our competitors. Unfortunately, even today, some law firm marketing agencies still mislead their clients via "reporting." One particularly egregious example comes in the form of ranking reports. Which prompted this LinkedIn post. To my surprise, I received a lot of […]
John Wanamaker supposedly said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." In an an effort to figure out "what half is working," attribution was born. Coupled with a transition from traditional, offline ads to digital media, attribution became the holy grail for analyzing advertising spends. But […]
I recently asked ChatGPT, "What are some of the top personal injury law firms in Chicago?? Actually, first I ask "who are some of the top personal injury lawyers in Chicago?" ChatGPT couldn't handle that one, so I modified the prompt. ChatGPT listed five very well-known firms downtown. Can you guess the other four? That's […]
If you're like me, you have some degree of AI, ChatGBT, Bard, exhaustion. Now don't get me wrong, this is stuff is remarkable and is changing, well, a lot. But before you hook up the ChatGPT API to your WordPress API and crank out 10,000 pages, here are a few things to think about. Let's […]
If you know me, you know my opinions about links and SEO advice from Google. If you don't, here's the TL;DR: Meh, links! Meaning, all things being equal, links still remain a competitive difference maker for ranking. Take Google's SEO advice with several grains of salt. Google has no economic incentive to help your site […]
The best marketing advice I can give you is to be authentic. Of course, you don't find that very helpful in terms of meeting your growth goals. So, you might decide to game the system. As I'm writing this, one of the more popular ways to gain the system is to pay for engagement. This […]
The following post was written by ChatGPT. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a state-of-the-art language model that can generate human-like text based on a given prompt or context. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way that businesses, including law firms, market themselves to potential clients. One way that a law firm could use […]
How long does SEO take? When can I expect to see results? What results should I expect to see? These are all reasonable questions that we field from lawyers every day. And, like many legal answers, the answer is: It depends. Yes, I know that's not the answer you wanted. But it's the most honest […]
And how much time should they spend doing it? I recently had the privilege of chatting with Tyson, Jim, and Conrad for an upcoming episode of The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. If you're not familiar with The Maximum Lawyer community, you should definitely check it out. Jim asked a really great question about who should do […]
